… good family has gone forth in this way, he is covetous, with strong passion for sensual desires, with a mind of ill will, of corrupt resolves, his mindfulness muddled, unalert, unconcentrated, his mind distracted, loose in his sense faculties. Just as a log from a funeral pyre, burning at both ends, smeared with excrement in the middle, fills no use as timber either in …
… In other
words, you tell yourself to focus on the breath in a certain way, to
work with the breath a certain way, then you do it, and then you have
to evaluate the results—one, to make sure you’re doing things the way
you tell yourself to do, and when the results don’t come out, you have
to figure out why …
… This is another example in how the Buddha’s teaching is the middle way
that steps outside of the either/or that so many people in society
present us with. It steps out by framing the issue in a totally new
way. The Buddha’s question is: Do you want to be free? That’s in line
with the example he gives. He left …
… As
we say in the chant, it’s admirable in the beginning, admirable in the
middle, admirable in the end. Sometimes it’s hard, sometimes it’s
easy, but it’s admirable all the way.
… You want sights, sounds, smells, tastes,
tactile sensations to be this way, and they’re not that way.
Sometimes the pleasures and pains come from your desire to gain
awakening. Those, the Buddha said, are actually useful. There’s the
pain that comes when you realize, “Okay, there’s awakening out there
and I haven’t gotten there yet.” He says not to try …
… It doesn’t involve doing anything demeaning, and it doesn’t involve
anything less than honorable, which is why the Buddha said that it’s
admirable in the beginning, admirable in the middle, admirable in the
end. It’s good all the way through.
… We think in these ways as a way of getting the mind to finally settle
down.
Ajaan Maha Boowa’s image is of two different kinds of trees.
Undirected meditation, he says, is like a tree out in the middle of a
meadow. If you want to cut it down, it doesn’t involve much
calculation as to which direction you should cut it …
… This gives you an island that gets you out of the
flood for a bit, but you’re still in the middle of the river. You
haven’t made it all the way across. But it gives you something to hold
on to in the meantime.
So you want to be really good at this. As Ajaan Lee used to say, the
people who …
… There is another passage where the Buddha talks about the way beings wander on in this world. It’s like throwing a stick up into the air. Sometimes it lands on this end, sometimes it lands on that end, sometimes it lands splat in the middle. No real pattern. No real direction. This doesn’t mean that life is hopeless. But it means simply …
Adult Dhamma
March 5, 2015
I was reading a review of a short-story collection recently, in which the reviewer was noting that although the author wasn’t experimental in the way she structured her stories, she was revolutionary or radical in that she treated her characters like adults, and her readers like adults. Unfortunately, that’s pretty rare.
The same observation applies to …
… If they are in good shape, try to maintain them that way. This
way, you give yourself strength. Again, it’s the strength of having
friends.
In Thailand, one of the old ways of teaching the strength of harmony
or of concord in a group would be to show a little kid a stick, and
say, “Can you snap the stick in two?” The …
… There’s a passage where the Buddha calls concentration a “perception
attainment.” The perception lies at the heart of what we’re doing
here, maintaining the perception of breath all the way through the in-
breath, all the way through the out-, and then learning how to augment
that perception, because a perception on its own can’t withstand the
force of a lot …
… People learned the Dhamma by listening to it
and memorizing it, and there was a very systematic way of memorizing
long passages of Dhamma.
We’ve lost that ability now. Our memories get shorter and shorter
because we get more and more dependent on gadgets to keep things in
mind for us. Which is sad, because those gadgets are not going to be
with …
… to find some way around it. In Ajaan Lee’s image, the three main divisions of the path—virtue, concentration, and discernment—are like the posts for a bridge over a river. Virtue is the post on this side of the river, discernment is on the other side of the river, while the concentration post is right in the middle of the river, where …
… This gives you an island that gets you out of the flood for a bit, but you’re still in the middle of the river. You haven’t made it all the way across. But it gives you something to hold on to in the meantime.
You want to be really good at this. As Ajaan Lee used to say, the people who manage …
… There’s another passage in the texts where they talk about how once
you settle down, you remind yourself that here you are out in the
middle of a very quiet countryside, not quite wilderness here, but
it’s quiet. All the issues related to back home, if they come up in
your mind, aren’t really related to anything around you. Issues coming …
… We should hope that they see the error of their ways, change their way of action, because that’s how goodness gets established in the world—not by going around and punishing all the wrong doers, because often the punishment won’t make them see the fact that they were wrong to begin with. You can pile up all kinds of evidence, but if …
There’s a passage where King Pasenadi comes to see the Buddha in the
middle of the day, and the Buddha asks him, “What have you been
doing?” The king in a remarkable display of frankness says, “Oh, the
typical things that obsess a person who’s obsessed with power.” And
the Buddha asks him, “Suppose a trustworthy person were to come from
the …
We’re in the middle of a heat wave. It seems that no matter what you
do in the course of the day, you feel drained by evening. It takes a
fair amount of effort simply to come here and meditate. And when
you’re feeling weakened by the temperature and tired from your work,
your defenses are down, and feelings become very prominent …
… Now at that time—it being the uposatha day—Visākhā, Migāra’s mother, went to the Blessed One in the middle of the day and, on arrival, having bowed down to him, sat to one side. As she was sitting there the Blessed One said to her, “Well now, Visākhā, why are you coming in the middle of the day?”
“Today I am observing …
SN 22:80 Piṇḍolya Sutta | Almsgoers
… good family has gone forth in this way, he is covetous, with strong passion for sensual desires, with a mind of ill will, of corrupt resolves, his mindfulness muddled, unalert, unconcentrated, his mind distracted, loose in his sense faculties. Just as a log from a funeral pyre, burning at both ends, smeared with excrement in the middle, fills no use as timber either in …
Swept Downstream
… This gives you an island that gets you out of the flood for a bit, but you’re still in the middle of the river. You haven’t made it all the way across. But it gives you something to hold on to in the meantime. So you want to be really good at this. As Ajaan Lee used to say, the people who …
